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Charles Wilkinson has written several notable books on a wide range of issues facing the modern West. His latest book, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (University of Washington Press, 576 pages, $35) is a fascinating, at times heart-wrenching, historical account of the tribe he worked to help restore in the seventies. The book traces the long history of the Siletz, from the days preceding contact with Euro-American settlers, through war, relocation, and eventual termination as a federally recognized tribe. It continues into the modern era with the tribe's restoration and subsequent revival of traditional heritage, arts, and language. Widely regarded as one of the nation's pre-eminent experts in tribal and natural resources law in the West, Wilkinson is Distinguished Professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and is the author of many books, including The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West and Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations.New West: This book obviously grew from a deep personal regard for the Siletz people, and for their remarkable survival amidst immense adversity. How did this project first come about?Charles Wilkinson: I was an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund here in Boulder in the seventies, and had represented the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin in being restored. Congress had terminated tribes in the fifties, broken the treaties, sold off the land, and ended all federal services, with the idea that they'd just blend into the larger society. The policy was a colossal failure. When the Menominee were the first tribe to be restored, people from Siletz came out and said they wanted to achieve restoration, and I was assigned to the case.
Very soon after that, by coincidence I went to teach at the University of Oregon Law School and I was now within two hours of the reservation. That meant that I got to see a lot of the Siletz people. It was the time of the fish wars in the Northwest, when tribes had been awarded fifty percent of the salmon runs, so Indian issues were very sensitive and there was strong opposition from the fishing community to the bill. There were a lot of public meetings, at which the tribal members and I would go to explain that the bill didn't affect fishing rights. There were a lot of late night meetings and I just got to know people really well.

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You know, covered by the concept pf poetry there are 36 stanza patterns, 26 set length poem types, 12 indefinite length types and 8 nonspecific format elements. Blank verse is just one of these. But I venture that 80 percent of the poetry written today is of this type. While blank verse, if its good and flows smoothly, is a delight to the ear and the mind’s eye, I still like a meter and a rhyme in my poetry.
Here is a snippet of a poem written in Spanish in Mexico by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz around 1680 and translated by Alan S. Trueblood around 1980:

Rose, celestial flower finely bred,
you offer in your scented subtlety
crimson instruction in everything that’s fair,
snow-white sermons to all beauty.
Semblance of our human shapeliness,
portent of proud breeding’s doom,
in whose being Nature chose to link
a joyous cradle and a joyless tomb.
How haughtily you broadcast in your prime
your scorn of all suggestion you must die!
Yet how soon as you wilt and waste away,
your withering brings mortality’s reply.
Wherefore with thoughtless life and thoughtful death,
in dying you speak true, in life you lie.*

bozemangelas needs way more public art. the poem dispenser is fantabulous. bozeman needs more public visual and performance art. thank goodness for sweet pea, music on main, and shakespear in the parks. has anyone ever daydreamt about cutting off traffic on main st. for a couple of blocks (rouse to something… wilson or further) after evening hours for public bazaar? maybe even permanently? the new parking garage would make that slightly more feasable… think about it next time next time you drive through… i wonder what the business owners think… i would bet they think i’m an idiot.

For Peter Danbury – thanks for the reminder. Over time the difference between “free verse” and “blank verse” dimmed in my mind. But da dum X 5 requires a measure of creative discipline also.

For bozemaneer – I’m with you, we all could use more art but sometimes we fail to recognize it when we see it. I am reminded of a neat quote I read some years ago: “What we so self-consciously call “modern art,” after all, is nothing more nor less than the art of this time, our time, our art; there is no other today. If we could have a different art, or a better , we would have it. As it is, we are lucky in this period to have any art at all. ” (William Barrett – Irrational Man (1958)) . I think the observation is timeless.